


Kokopelli Face Tattoo

by fakeboi



Category: Camp Camp (Web Series)
Genre: Black Comedy, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Mental ward AU, Self-Harm, Suicide Attempts
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-08
Updated: 2018-07-16
Packaged: 2019-03-28 13:27:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13904958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fakeboi/pseuds/fakeboi
Summary: "Presumably, a 'Kokopelli face tattoo' would be a drawing of a penis on someone’s face. Not only will the narrator be beaten, but also humiliated." -- Eldritch, a Genius contributorMax is committed to a mental ward after attempting suicide. David is determined to help him, and Max is convinced that he's beyond help. Also, Campbell Hospital is an understaffed shithole packed with rowdy children. Dicks are drawn, Uno cards are eaten, and the Ativan is legal.





	1. When The Hate Train Started

I know I look like a crazy person when I act like this, which is probably because I am one. Usually there's a little piece of my head that knows this. I'm leaning over and biting down on my arm when the counselor looks away. She's reading, something crime-related with a dull, creased cover. It's a book about murder, it's probably even a book that talks about suicide. 

I'm the only one who's not allowed to think about dying. I sink my teeth in deeper. I want it to fucking bruise. We all die, in hospitals and nursing homes, surrounded by apathetic cousins and tired employees. In our houses, in our favorite armchairs, starving to death. Marinating in our own piss and shit. Statistically, I was more likely to be killed on the drive to Campbell Hospital than by the number of pills I took. I'm here for my own safety, according to the staff.

"Max," says the counselor. "Keep your hands where I can see them, for Christ's sake." A skinny, moon-faced girl with springy blue hair twists around in her plastic preschool chair.

"You're under arrest!" the girl shouts, pointing finger guns at me. "Pow, pow, pow!" The counselor sighs and rubs her eyes.

"Nikki, please. You know gun talk isn't allowed." I put my arms back on the table, covering one with the other. The counselor could still see the bite marks if she paid any fucking attention. Normally my hoodie hides them, but I haven't been here a full 24 hours yet, so I'm stuck in the hospital gown. Standard procedure. It's freezing in here, and I'm wearing a dress made out of paper. Campbell sucks way worse than the last hospital I was at, which at least had armchairs and a decent TV. 

This one has stupid tiny baby chairs in neon colors, and nothing to do besides doodle on stacks of construction paper and enjoy the very limited selection of books and board games. There's a copy of a James Bond book that's thirty years old, yellowing and with the pages falling out. The cover looks racist. We also have Dork Diaries #1, #5, and #8, but I'm not currently that desperate. Nikki walks over to me and waves her hand in front of my face. Maybe I should go grab a copy of Dork Diaries and pretend to read it until she goes away.

"Hi! You're Max, right? Wanna play Connect 4? There's nothing to do in here," she says. I shake my head no, but she's already pulling out the Connect 4 box. Someone has definitely been chewing on the edge of it, and I can't blame them. Couldn't taste worse than the hospital food.

"So I'm Nikki, and I'm in for aggression, 'cause I tried to murder six people. Just joking, I got in a fight at school, and the other kid's dad was a lawyer, and my mom said 'Nikki, how many times have I told you? Don't fight anyone whose family has more money then ours', and I was like..." 

The rest of what she said comes out as gibberish, or actually, maybe I'm just hearing it that way. I put a Connect 4 piece in the... Connect 4 thing. Well, it might be a checkers piece. The game pieces tend to get mixed up in hospitals.

"Whoa, somebody wrote swears on this piece!" says Nikki. I grab a piece of blue construction paper, and start doodling some skulls. Maybe I'll give some of them pentagrams for eyes.

"Nice," I say. I say "nice" when I'm not listening to someone, but I don't want to argue with them. I've already seen one fight in the period of time that I've been here and awake, and while I don't have earrings that could be ripped out, it's probably best to avoid starting shit at Campbell. I glance around the room and see who else is around, since maybe I could somehow deflect Nikki onto one of them. She's still talking. There's a blonde girl who has had her head down on the table for the past thirty minutes, a guy singing to himself in the corner, and a gigantic dude who looks like he's sharpening his washable Crayola TM marker into a shiv. Okay.

"What're you in for?" asks Nikki. This is an easy one.

"I really fucking suck at killing myself," I say. She laughs. More accurately, she cackles like she's the goddamn Wicked Witch of the West.

"You and everyone else here, pal. Aw, sweet, I connected four!" She has.

"Uh huh. Nice," I say. I mean, you never know, it's very possible that Nikki could kick my ass. You gotta avoid messing with the aggression kids. We've just started a second game of Connect 4 when the door grinds open, revealing a tall redheaded man in scrubs with a curly-headed kid slouching next to him.

"Hey, Gwen," he says to the counselor on duty, "we're gonna start group. You're on hall duty, okay?" 

"No prob," says Gwen without looking at him. 

"I got Neil to come out of his room!" he says. He grins like he just won the lottery, and gestures to Neil like he's a gigantic novelty check. Gwen nods and heads out into the hall. Good for her, I guess. She gets to read her book in peace. The redhead pulls out a chair for himself, and while he's occupied Neil mimes shooting himself in the mouth. I smile at the floor. 

"Good afternoon, kids!" says the redhead, "For those of you who haven't met me, I'm David, and I'm a counselor here at Campbell Hospital. You're all here because you're going through a dark periods in your lives, and I'm here to lighten things up. Ered, would you mind passing around some worksheets?" Nobody moves. 

"Ered, would you mind passing around some worksheets?" says David, louder this time. The blonde girl with her head on the table mumbles "yes". 

"Okay, well, would anyone else like to--" he continues. 

"Jesus fucking Christ, I'll do it," I say. I stand up and shove my chair away from the table. David walks up to me and hands me the worksheets. He tries to fistbump my other hand, but I pull it away.

"I appreciate your enthusiasm, buddy, but not your language. Please try to keep it PG, okay?" says David.

"Eat a dick," I say. Then I start passing around the worksheets. David pulls a disappointed face and shakes his head, but I can hear snickering from behind me, so I must be doing something right. I retake my seat and check out my work sheet, which has different smiley faces marked with different emotions. HAPPY, LONELY, ANGRY. Just in case I couldn't tell that the one with an upside-down U for a mouth was supposed to mean sad. There's a blank space next to each face.

"Next to each emotion," David says, "I want everyone to write down something in their life that triggers that feeling for them." Next to HAPPY, I write "being dead". Next to ANGRY, I write "my parents", but then I scratch it out. I don't want to be ungrateful. They didn't have to let me go on antidepressants, they didn't have to give me a second chance after I ran away, they didn't have to homeschool me when it became obvious I couldn't handle school. Anyway, I don't want to tell David shit about my family. He's not even a doctor. It's not like anything bad has really happened to me. The problem with my life is that I'm the one living it. My folks have called me a sociopath, a lazy asshole, a waste of their time and effort and love. I'd resent more it if they weren't so right. I don't need another therapist, psychiatrist, or whoever telling me to love myself and love my life. As long as I'm around, everything sucks forever. It's not self-loathing if it's true.

Next to ANGRY, I write "campbell hospital". If I didn't want to off myself before coming here, I do now. Seems kind of counterproductive. But then, society's solution to crime is to lock up the perpetrators with a bunch of other criminals. So they can plot together. Neil is sitting next to me now, and Nikki is talking his ear off. He's not writing, and is pretty much just staring into space until he looks over at my worksheet.

"Hey," he whispers, "this place is terrible. Do you want to try and break out?" Sure, it probably won't work. But it'll give me something to do besides Connect 4.

"Fuck yeah," I say.


	2. Somebody's Gotta Do It

List of escape plans Neil and I have failed to enact:

Hiding inside of the food cart and getting wheeled out into the main hospital: Neil's too tall to fit, and my head is too big. Also, now we're not allowed to get our own food from the food cart, which means we always get our trays last. Fuckin' bullshit.

Sharpening a fork and using it to pick the lock on the door to the ward: The lock is on the outside. It's clearly on the outside, Neil.

Sneaking out the door with a counselor during their shift change: I SWEAR TO GOD NURSE DANIEL CAN TURN HIS HEAD ALL THE WAY AROUND LIKE AN OWL HE ALWAYS SEES US. HE'S ONLY OFF DUTY AT NIGHT I HATE HIM.

Using a chair to smash a window and then jumping out: This is more of a suicide plan, since we're six stories up. I was willing to give it a go anyway, but it looks like the glass is double-paned.

Poisoning myself by eating hand sanitizer so I can just die already: I didn't tell Neil about this plan, since it seemed like a one-man job to me, but Gwen the counselor caught me with my mouth on the Purell bottle and made me throw up. I didn't even actually get to eat any.

"Well, seems like we're pretty much hosed," says Neil, bouncing his stress ball against the rec room wall.

"Yeah. Hey, Neil?" I say.

"What, Max?" Neil answers.

"Never fucking say hosed again," I say. Neil frowns. I hear a loud banging noise.

"Okay, we can have a discussion on 'hosed' later. Right now, I think it's important to note that all of these escape attempts are probably extending our stay, and so far exactly none of them have worked," he says. On the one hand, that's true. On the other hand, if I give in and pretend that the hospital and its cloying cheery bullshit is helping me, I've let The Man win. I don't want to be a part of this pathetic conveyor belt one-size-fits-all approach to mental health care!

"You're going to just give up? Are you serious?" I say. The noise is back. It's coming from behind us. 

"Yeah, I mean... my dad sucks, but I still want to go home. I miss my laptop," says Neil.

"Crap on a cracker, not the laptop again," I say.

"Code-y Typesworth is my best friend, and you can go to hell," Neil says. God, he's such a nerd.

"God, you're such a nerd," I tell him. I hear the banging noise for a third time, and whip my head around to see what it is. Four kids are playing cards around the back table in the rec room, and they're all slamming their hands on the table.

"Stack! Stack! Stack!" yells Nikki. People around the table are slamming down cards. Then someone doesn't slam down a card, and everyone shouts "NOOOOOOO". Gwen, who is on duty again, loudly shushes her. Neil turns around.

"What... what game are you playing?" he asks. Nikki tosses some cards in the air.

"Uno! Do you guys wanna play?" she says.

"This is not any version of Uno that I understand," says Neil. 

"It's the best version!" says Nikki. Neil shrugs and scoots his chair over. I roll my eyes and stay where I am. Guess it's time for another chapter of Racist James Bond. Well, maybe all James Bond is Racist James Bond... okay, there's no way any human being would be named Kissy Suzuki. That's actually the dumbest shit I've ever read in my life, and I read Dork Diaries #5 yesterday. Its main character is named Nikki, and she's almost as annoying at the real Nikki. I grab some coloring pages from the other side of the table, and I'm just getting caught up in x-ing out the eyes of all the people when I hear more screeching from the direction of the Uno players. They're chanting in unison. Like a cult.

"EAT! THE! CARD! EAT! THE! CARD!"

Neil is holding an Uno card up to his mouth, his hands shaking. Okay, that's enough. I stand up.

"Dude, what the actual fuck?" I ask.

"Well, in some newer editions of Uno, there are... blank cards. So players can write in a card-related action. 'Draw six cards', for example," says Neil.

"And someone wrote 'eat a card'? Why?" I say. One of the other Uno kids sighs and looks at the ground.

"Some people just want to watch the world burn," he says. Gwen must have overheard our conversation, or at least the "eat the card" part, because she gets up.

"Nobody is eating any cards, okay? If anybody even takes a nibble of one, they're going in the quiet room for the rest of the day," says Gwen. Neil puts the card back down on the table, and I know what I have to do. I pick it up, tear it in half, and jam it in my mouth. I start chewing. Then I flip Gwen off with both hands. She freezes.

"Fuck you!" I say. I have an Uno card in my mouth, but she definitely got the gist. I grab Nikki's styrofoam cup of water, and I swallow the chewed-up card. Nikki and Ered applaud. Everyone else just sort of looks confused. Gwen grabs one of my wrists, and drags me to the doorway. I don't put up a fight. She leans out into the hallway, where David is on duty.

"David? Max... ate a playing card." David escorts me to the quiet room, which really is basically just a quiet room. No padded walls or anything. There's a bed with restraints on it, but as far as I know they're never really used. Apparently, a week before I got here, a patient was sent a bottle of nail polish from home. She broke it and used it to slit her wrists. Lucky. Anyway, she did get tied to the bed. 

There are leaves and flowers painted on the wall in here, and I trace over them with my fingers. The first time I got hospitalized, I imagined something out of a horror movie. The actual scary part is how boring it is. I'm not being sarcastic. There's no distractions here, nothing to keep me from thinking about myself and my life. I'd take a million killer clowns over an hour alone with my own brain. Unfortunately, the clowns are not an option. Which is disappointing, because that'd be a cool way to die.


	3. Hey Dude, I Hate Everything You Do

I'm trying to count how many tiles are on the ceiling, but I keep getting distracted and losing count and my head keeps filling up with awful, blurry shit that I don't want to remember. My mom saying she hates me and slamming her hand on a takeout container. And then a bunch of other stuff after that, which I'm not sure if she said or not. Some things stay buried for a reason, but hey, I guess my brain feels like playing grave robber today! Okay, hang on, there's like 8 of these tiles in each row vertically, except that where it hits the wall you get a half tile... they could've given me a book. I'm drumming my fingers on the floor when I hear the door creak open. 

"Max? Just wanted to come check up on you, buddy," says David. Oh god. Actually, never mind what I said! I'm good hanging out in here by myself and counting the tiles!

"Go fuck yourself," I say. David makes an upset "hmm" noise, but instead of leaving, he steps inside the quiet room. 

"Max, I noticed that you've been very hostile towards me and the other staff here at Campbell. I want to make sure you're having the best experience possible, because we're here to help you. You know that, right?" David says.

"If you actually wanted to give me the best possible experience, you'd poison me in my sleep," I say. David kneels down, moving him closer to where I'm sitting on the floor. He looks at me, and I look at the ceiling.

"I don't want you to be dishonest about your feelings, but it is worth noting that we can't let you leave the hospital unless we think that you're going to be safe. And right now, you don't sound safe," says David.

"Great, well, it's not just that I don't want to be here. I don't want to be anywhere. I could lie through my teeth and get out and go home, anyone could. At least here I can get drugs if I have a freakout and start biting myself," I say. Okay, too much information. Way too much. David stays silent for a minute, which is what people always do when they're trying to squeeze more out of you than you want to say. David wants me to believe he's all good intentions, but he's a manipulative motherfucker just like the rest. See, the goal of therapy isn't actually to make the patient happy or fulfilled. It's to get them to shut up and do their job, because everyone else can do it, and if they can't, they're sick. I'm sick. And no amount of meditation or antidepressants will change that.

"Is there something going on at home?" says David.

"No," I say. Because there's not. My parents aren't like, kicking my ass or not buying food or doing drugs. They just don't like me, which is understandable, because even I don't like me. I just happen to be a sensitive little bitch about it. David waits for me to say something else, and I don't. The ceiling is 10 tiles across, excluding the half tiles.

"Okay, well, if you don't feel comfortable talking, I'm not going to push you. But I did hear from Gwen that you've been complaining a lot about your room being cold. Do you want someone to get you a couple of extra blankets?" he says. Time for a cost-benefit analysis.

Pros of asking for the blankets: I won't be freezing my ass off every night, and maybe I can try to tie the blankets together and hang myself or something.

Cons of asking for the blankets: David will think he's getting through to me. He's not. I do have some pride.

I make a noise that could be interpreted as "yes", "no", or... "yo", I guess. But David nods, and a grin spreads across his face.

"Sure, getting the blankets will be no problem!" he says. Goddamnit, I wasn't ready! David gets up, and while he does, he puts something on the floor. As he walks away whistling, I realize he's left me a copy of that gross old James Bond book. Oh, you have GOT to be kidding me. I pick it up, because it sure beats counting ceiling tiles, and I read for a while. Eventually, I actually see the quote that the book is titled after.

“You only live twice:  
Once when you are born  
And once when you look death in the face.”

Not a bad line, actually. It's like finding a shiny new quarter in a pile of dog shit. Except that I've looked death in the face a couple of times, and I still don't see the point in living. They end up letting me out of the quiet room for dinner, so I guess Gwen doesn't actually have the power to keep me in there all day. I really have seen them opening the door and leaving trays of food, though. Like you're in solitary confinement, which... going by the dictionary definition of "solitary" and "confinement", I guess you actually are. 

I'm eating chicken strips today, because I eat chicken strips for every meal except breakfast in here. They don't let you have chicken strips for breakfast. I used to be a vegetarian like my mom, but at age ten I tasted a corn dog and I never went back. Later on, I realized that corn dogs are so processed that the soy version tastes basically the same, but by then I'd already eaten a whole bunch of other delicious meats. Which is probably for the best, because this hospital never seasons their fucking vegetables. Nikki slides up next to me, and I don't even bother to not audibly groan. She doesn't seem to notice.

"Hey, Max! I heard you did time!" she says.

"You could say that," I say.

"Yep, and I just did!" she replies. Neil takes his tray and sits down.

"Hey, Max?" he says, "That was actually kind of cool how you ate that card. Stupid, but cool."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The James Bond quote from this chapter is specifically from the book You Only Live Twice, which I guess is pretty obvious. I actually read it during my own hospitalization, and it was indeed a bad book.


	4. I Know My Place

Nikki bounces up and down in her too-small chair.

"So did your mouth turn blue from the card? Can I see?" she says. Neil leans over and tries to look inside my mouth too, since apparently everybody at this table wants to see my ink-stained teeth so desperately that it's like they're the movie of the fucking summer.

"Are you going to get ink poisoning?" Neil asks.

"I wish," I say. Nikki raises her eyebrows.

"Y'know, you're pretty gloomy for someone who's here to get better," she says. I grab a potato wedge off of her plate.

"And you're pretty cheery for someone who's in a locked mental ward," I answer. 

"Dude, my potato!" she says. Okay, so she doesn't care. I'm pretty sure that you could stick Nikki in a maximum security men's prison and she'd still mostly be worried about not getting her fair share of low-calorie french fry alternatives. Nikki slams her hand down on my tray, and flips the whole thing over. I have ketchup on me now. 

"You deserve the death sentence, Nikki," I say. She shrugs, smiling ear to ear.

"Well, for my final meal, nobody better take my potatoes." Gwen slaps her hand to her forehead for what must be the eighth time today at least, and walks over to clean up the mess.

"Max, why does this kind of thing always happen around you?" she says. 

"You know why. I'm a miserable failure and everything I do is wrong," I say. 

"No. Wrong answer. It was a rhetorical question, Max," says Gwen. Nikki and Neil are quiet for a second, I assume because they feel bad. Goddamnit.

"You're a good kid, Max. All of you are. You're just a little... chaotic," says Gwen. I wish she was right. She hands me a paper towel to wipe my face off with, and starts cleaning up the tray. "Seriously though, food stays on the tray. Did not think I'd have to specify that."

After lunch, we have quiet time in our rooms. Some kids have puzzles and decks of cards and shit, and some kids have parents who don't send them jack. Still walking around in hospital clothes, which would make me sad if I could still feel sad.

My folks are kind of in-between, because they sent me some clothes and Mr. Honeynuts. I love my bear (and no one can ever know) but he is not a great source of entertainment. Kinda just sits there. 

I did get a stress ball from one of the therapists, so I bounce it against the wall, looking out the window onto a lovely view of the hospital parking lot. I'd take a nap if it weren't too cold to sleep.

I hate this frigid hellhole, this Satanic iceberg, this abandoned supermarket freezer. Adults have been telling me since forever that life sucks, life is unfair, life is hard work, but apparently I'm an unstable freak for even considering bringing that to its logical conclusion: That life isn't worth it. I don't want some idiot to save my life again so I can end up in another place like this. 

Of course, that's not what's supposed to happen. The second I got here, an army of do-gooder counselors starting swarming me to say how many great things I still have ahead of me. Sure. 

(Gwen checked me in, tired-eyed and barely making the effort to play nice. I think she started this job because she wanted to help people, but I'm not sure if that's why she's still here.)

Go to college for the opportunity to do schoolwork that bores me so I can one day have a job I hate, and then spend most of my time working when I've never had the ability to care about any activity except "fucking around". And forget living for my loved ones. I don't have friends, I barely even have family. I have doctors. There's no one stupid enough to care about me unless it's their job.

(Nikki's stupid happy face and her stupid wide eyes that look straight into mine. She's not embarrassed to know me, she doesn't think I'm a failure, and she's just plain wrong.)

I have people who might cry at my funeral, who might be genuinely upset that something bad happened to someone they knew, which I guess is better than nothing. I don't find it comforting, though, because people will grieve for anyone. 

(My parents stop showing up to school events one day, and that doesn't make me nearly as sad as realizing I don't really want them there.)

Cats, murderers, great-grandmas they've never met. It doesn't mean they give a shit if I live or die, it means that they're uncomfortable with death. They don't really know me, they don't really like me, and any hole in their lives I'd create by offing myself would close up pretty damn fast.

(David, who looks like he smiles and laughs and goes out in the sun a lot, who looks like he has better things to do than join the parade of impotent nice guys who don't realize that the hole I'm in is deeper than they think. That when they throw down a ladder it just becomes another thing I'm gonna get buried with.)

The drama of it all, y'know? I'm on a roll with this self-pitying monologue, so of course it has to get interrupted. I hear something behind me, my door swinging from "open just a crack" to "open halfway". 

When I turn around, I realize that someone's slid a deck of cards into my room, and then I look down the hall and see Neil sprinting away. 

I'm shocked both that he would do something so nice for me and that he would ever run in a situation where he isn't being chased by a bear. I start playing a game of solitaire. I'll thank him later, I guess. He better not think that I owe him one or anything. Solitaire sucks.

After quiet time in our rooms, we have group with David. We watch him shove the little chairs into a circle, making those godawful screechy chair-on-floor noises. I make a point of sitting with my feet on my chair. I'm not allowed to sit backwards or on the floor, so this is what I do.

"Max, are you ready to talk about why you came here?" asks David. This is a lie. This is a game. This is a cycle where the hospital patches you up and sends you out and you break down again, get hurt again and you go back and you go back and you--

"NO. Fuck off," I say. David could've sent me to the quiet room, but he didn't. 

"Okay. Not today," he says. He clears his throat, and turns to Neil.

"You're seeing your dad tomorrow, right? Are you nervous? Excited? How do you feel?" asks David. Neil sighs.

"I'm seeing my dad and my dad's new girlfriend. They're all so weird. And my dad only ever does things for them, like he'll take this lady out for dinner and I'll get Pop Tarts," he says. David nods like he thinks he understands. 

"You feel like your dad isn't spending enough time with you, being a parent," he says. Neil's eye twitches. as he speaks.

"I think he knows that dating would be way easier for him if he didn't have a kid."

I want to cry during dinner but I don't. There's a new kid, an amazing distraction, with a big toy plastic helmet he never takes off. His breath fogs it up because he never shuts his mouth.

"You know," I say, "you're never going to go to space. They give you a mental evaluation before they send you up there." 

"You don't know anything about being an astronaut! This isn't gonna count against me anyway, I'm gonna be all better by the time I'm an adult. When I go to Mars, I'll..." The Space Kid keeps talking, but I tune him out. I hope I hurt he's feelings. 

Anyone who's had a life easy enough to be that oblivious deserves to get their feelings hurt. I take a bite out of my chicken fingers and wish I had a Pop Tart.

"Sorry your dad sucks, Neil," says Nikki, "at least my mom hangs out with me, even if she only wants to do the boring indoor stuff she likes." 

Space Kid is still droning on in the background, pausing only to lift the bottom of his helmet up and spoon food into his mouth. He makes spaceship noises when he does it. 

"Max, what are your parents like?" asks Nikki.

I tell her they're good.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the wait.

**Author's Note:**

> This fanfiction and its chapters are titled after the song Kokopelli Face Tattoo by AJJ. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFz2J6S0J0c


End file.
